A few weeks ago the Victoria & Albert Museum opened the doors to its new Jewellery Gallery. The impressive William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery boasts 3500 jewels from the V&As collection, focussed principally on the last 800 years of European jewellery. The opening night attracted around 1500 people. Not surpising when you see some of the amazing objects out on display (behind heavily fortified glass of course).

The opening night was also a big moment for Cogapp, as we had designed and built three interactive kiosks to allow visitors to search the large collection and find out more about the objects. The ‘Search the Jewellery Gallery’ kiosks let visitors find specific jewels, or explore the collection by applying interchangeable filters such as ‘Material’ or ‘Location’ to pull together custom user-specified groups of objects.

The software also features a deeply zoomable interface that allows the very close inspection of each object’s detail. Given the small scale of some of the pieces, and the fact they must be placed behind glass, this function plays an important part in allowing visitors to really inspect and examine the exquisite detail many of the jewels feature.

We made a video of the interactive in action, as the screenshots can’t quite convey everything. Do follow the link and take a look….

On the way back from Museums and the Web in Montreal, Ben and myself stopped off in Manhattan, to visit MoMA. This was under the guise of doing work (seeing the finished MoMA.guide installation in the flesh) but in reality was an excuse to go to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. MoMA’s site goes some way to capturing just how many cool things were crammed into the space, you are left physically exhausted with the sheer amount of information and ideas bombarding you. Highlights included:

Philip Worthington: Shadow Monsters

Julius Popp: bit.fall

Noam Toran: Accessories for Lonely Men

Jonathon Harris, Sep Kamvar: I Want You To Want Me

Graffiti Research Lab: L.A.S.E.R Tag

Back in December last year Cogapp was honoured with a Design Week award nomination for our work on MoMA.guide. The awards ceremony took place last week and we were delighted to welcome along Allegra Burnette from MoMA and Matthew Cock from the British Museum.

I spoke to Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson about his experience of the awards.

We entered MoMA.guide which is a project that launches this month for the Museum of Modern Art. It’s an interactive public access kiosk system that guides visitors in their experience of MoMA. We entered it in the Digital Design Information category and we were shortlisted. I think, in the whole of the Design Week Awards there were 20 categories. Of which, there were only 2 core digital categories, Digital Design Commercial and ours.

One of the interesting things for us was entering the Digital Design Information category but not knowing who we were nominated with. When the nominees were revealed, we discovered that we were up against the Apple iPhone. So, obviously, we didn’t win but on a plus point we lost to the best in show! It’s nice to be in that field as a positive profile for Cogapp and I think there’s a general understanding that perhaps we wouldn’t win against such a high level device with such popularity.

Colin’s highlights:

The iPhone, which is winning every award out there at the moment for product design, interface design, packaging, you name it.

The Science Museum was really strong. They were entered into the hall of fame actually, which was great. And I think that was really interesting in terms of the projects they’re doing with interactive media as well.

The Natural History Museum - this was great! It’s educational packs for the Natural History Museum which are fantastic actually, they’re kinda’ little masks which you can look through and it’s just quite playful to see the Natural History Museum brand being used in this way. I’d love to see this happening on the web a lot more because there’s some really exciting stuff happening in print.

Last week saw the annual dSCAPE 2007 event that’s part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

It’s a great event that is brilliantly organised by the team at Wired Sussex, and a rare chance for agencies, freelancers and students to meet and talk about inspirations, innovations and share ideas (and beer).

Cogapp attended 2 of the events, Folio Clinic on the first night and Designers Night on the final night.

Starting with Folio Clinic, an event where students and freelancers can talk to established creatives and get advice, direction and possible opportunities in a quick-fire, informal environment.

Ben Aquilina and I were at the Cogapp table and had a steady flow of students and freelancers all night. It was a high standard overall and we were really impressed by the variety of skillsets available in the local area. Lots of 3D animators, illustrators and some really strong print and interactive designers bringing fresh ideas to the table.

You can see more images from the Folio Clinic on the dSCAPE website here.

The dSCAPE week finished with Designer’s Night at the Sallis Benney Theatre.

The presentation format was Pecha Kucha, where speakers, myself included, get 20 slides each lasting 20 seconds. It’s very informal, high paced and offers each person 6 minutes 40 seconds of banter/mayhem before the next presenter is up. The idea is to keep presentations sharp and to the point, and keep the interest level up for the audience.

The evening was a great success and the format made it superbly entertaining and inspirational. All the speakers were varied and had a great range of subjects to talk about, from ‘The Side Effects of Too Much Choice’ by John Davison of Kanoti to ‘Beautiful Music (2.0)’ by Mogul and the Prawn and ‘Subtractivism’ by Hamish Makgill of StudioMakgill.

You can find a full list of the speakers and their subjects here.

The was no overall ‘best talk’, that’s not the point, it’s the collaborative effect of all speakers that makes an entertaining and unexpected evening for the audience. But for me, particular mention goes out to Steve Price of Plan-B Studio for his amazing skill in delivering a brilliant talk despite a technical meldown of keynote and 5 minutes of mad ranting heckles by someone in the audience.

My talk (shown below) was titled ‘Click Art’ - A seat of your pants journey through the world of Art, interactives and inspirations, plus some random things thrown in for good measure.

A great night that was inspirational, entertaining and superb fun. Let’s have more of them…

The continuing story of our recent art installation project. Today - it’s time to delve into the technical side of the project…

With the physical installation and design/animation direction agreed, the next stage was to research and implement a delivery system that would fulfil the following requirements:

- To display the animations on a 4m x 1m surface in as high a resolution as possible. The most likely configuration would be three 1024 by 768 ’screens’, displayed edge to edge. (Luckily this gives a resolution of 3072 x 768, which is exactly 4:1)

- To be able to display multiple content types, such as QuickTime movies, images, openGL containers and Quartz Compositions

- To generate the animations in such a way that the key assets and text within them were created at run time, and hence would be easy to edit

- To run from one computer, to simplify installation and maintenance

- To provide edge blending and other alignment tools to reduce the need for physical projector alignment

The very high graphical requirements ruled out any off-the-shelf software. Instead, we decided to build our own display engine, written in Cocoa, which could then utilise both OpenGL and Apple’s Quartz Composer

Although the Eye display would be comprised of three ’screens’, we decided to show the animations using four projectors, with a great deal of overlap between them. The alternative was to butt the three screens together with no gap between them - something which would be very difficult (if not impossible).

Using overlaps created a new problem: the areas of overlap were much brighter than the rest of the display.

The engine displaying a simple alignment grid.

To counter this, the Engine needed built in edge-blending:

Test pattern with no edge blending - note the blue area on the right hand side.

Test pattern with edge blending.

In addition to edge blending, we also added a variety of other tools to the Engine, including: x and y position editor, colour balance editor and the ability to rotate each ’screen’ on its x, y or z axis.

Our early tests with the Engine used trailers for Ratatouille and - heaven forbid - Fantastic Four, so it was a delight when we were finally able to show prototype animations at full size:

A demo animation projected onto the wall. Note that the screens are not perfectly aligned; some blurring is visible on the latin body text.

After experimenting with different media types, we discovered the optimum set was as follows:

- QuickTime, for full screen animation elements

- Quartz Composer, for individual animated objects built around live images and movies

- OpenGL, for animated on-screen text

Animation elements were controlled and synchronised via a markup language developed especially for the Eye. We used an existing Cogapp technology, CEF, to author and edit the xml files, and then developed a schedule function so it could show any story or combination of stories at any time.

The innovation theme explodes into life, a combination of QuickTime, Quartz Composer and OpenGL.

In the next blog: finalising the animations, late night installation, robots and remote desktop…

The continuing story of our recent art installation project…

During the original proposal phase, we investigated how we might project animations onto a sheet of clear glass. Obviously this is not normally possible (try it - you get a faintly ghosted image and… er… thats it). However, we had previously discovered a product called HoloPro which seemed to fit our requirements: it is virtually transparent, so when placed on glass provides a near-invisible projection surface. In addition, it doesn’t display black, so if you project a white animation moving over a black background, what you see on the glass is the animation apparently moving in mid air. Nifty!

Ben Aquilina stood behind some sample HoloPro glass.

With the project secured, we began negotiations with the HoloPro supplier, Pro Nova and their UK representatives, Amvida. Our requirement was a single sheet of HoloPro film, which would be sandwiched between between two sheets of glass, each 4 metres wide by 1 metre high. At the time Pro Nova had not produced a single sheet anything like that size, so our initial plan was to create three sheets and have them butted together inside the glass.

To help with our investigation, Amvida kindly lent us a small sheet of HoloPro glass for the duration of the project.

The tech department install the test sheet of HoloPro.

A close up of the HoloPro film, showing the individual ‘cells’.

Joe stood behind the glass, running a demo animation. Simple lines and objects seem to work best on HoloPro.

The nature of HoloPro began to determine how the final animations would look. Clean simple lines and strong areas of colour gave the most impressive results. One of our earlier ideas was to have a sense that images and text were ‘growing’ onto the screen - HoloPro seemed to work brilliantly with this style of animation.

After a series of workshops with Prudential to determine the basic approach to the animations, we determined they would:

be slow and elegant
would build up over time
would be mainly black and white but incorporate key brand colours as highlights
would be ‘organic’ in nature i.e. waterfalls, globes, trees etc.

This gave us a good brief to begin development of the graphic and animation style. It now fell to our tech dept to build a software solution that would deliver these massive scale animations…

In the next blog: our technical solution, delivering ultra-wide screen projections (on the office’s back wall)

Flash on the Beach, the UK’s premier Flash event, took place last week in Brighton. There was a strong thread of generative art running through the conference, and how it can be used to create things that would be barely physically possible using traditional illustrator skills.

This post is going to be a bit epic, so here’s a pretty picture. The rest of the text follows after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

This time last year Cogapp embarked on one of its most extraordinary projects. A project which would involve: creating and installing the world’s largest single piece of ‘HoloPro’ film, embedded in a four metre sheet of glass; writing custom software to display, synchronise and merge high definition content over four ‘hidden’ projectors; and ultimately the creation of a unique and breathtaking piece of multimedia art. This would come to be known as the Prudential Eye.

The Prudential Group has a long history of sourcing and displaying beautiful art around its buildings. In 2006 they approached Cogapp to create brand new kind of art installation - one which would be challenging and thought-provoking, engaging but not distracting, and one which used state-of-the-art technology to tell a range of stories about the Group. This installation would be both art piece and storyteller.

Our solution was a sheet of glass, four metres by one, suspended in space, beautiful and ethereal, a real talking point - even when switched off!

Below: Early concept illustrations as presented to the project board.

Animations, text and images would dance across the glass, examining the past, present and future of the Prudential Group. A thoughtful mix of art and storytelling - using technology which did not yet exist, and on hardware that had never been built to this scale. The challenge was clear!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be putting up more ‘making of…’ posts about the Eye, taking you from the concepts above, all the way through to the robot assisted installation. To end part one of this story, here are some early mockups of the concept and a 3D walkthrough of what we planned to create…

Concept renders created by Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson.

iDesign, London’s first big conference on digital design, provided the main digital focus for the London Design Festival, backed by the London Development Agency. The event brought together online, mobile, film, games and TV, aiming to discuss how these affect our collective digital future with a focus on design principles and practices for both economic and social benefit.

iDesign itself was organised by Dynamo London and New Media Knowledge, and hosted by Simon Waterfall, who established a company Poke, and is the current D&AD president. Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson and Production Director Jason Ryan were in attendance after Malcolm Garrett of Applied Information Group nominated Cogapp as a creative inspiration in the digital supplement for Design Week magazine. The panel of judges, including Malcolm Garrett, talked about their inspirations, with some quite experimental and ‘out there’ ideas.

The event show stealer was Martyn Ware, a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17. Martyn’s current work with illustrious focuses on public space interactives that are very information driven. Martyn works in collaboration with Vince Clarke, from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, and showcased some terrific soundscape material, focusing on 3D sound and interactive spaces. Other contributors included (Malcolm’s fellow student) Peter Saville and Nick Knight’s SHowstudio, and D-Fuse.

Other speakers included Adam Gee, who presented on Channel 4 Big Art Mob – an arts-based cultural project housed by Channel 4 which uses mobile technology and user generated content to create what “the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art”. Although not fully cross-platform yet, the response from users is already encouraging.

Interactive lighting artist Jason Bruges, showed his illuminated visions of architectural augmentation. He has a strong body of work, doing public space projects like wind-generated light sticks, with really beautiful design. Dazed Digital have a feature on Jason to watch here.The iDesign panel showed a great deal of pioneering and emotive projects, and the design discussions were very broad in topic. There was a really nice wide discussion about how these things need to start connecting with the important side of user experience, online and offline campaigns, and more; bringing a very intelligent and fun edge to what was a pure design conference. You can read a full report on the Dynamo London site here.

Here is a video clip of Malcolm Garrett’s talk at the conference we thought we’d share, with some rather familiar characters featured. Thanks to Youtube user Drumgold who has lots of other material from iDesign.

Chances are, if you’re watch telly any point soon you’ll probably be seeing a font created by Fontsmith.

Ben, Fiona and I have come across Fontsmith a few times this year, they’ve created a number of stunning typefaces used by a few of our clients and are currently the ‘tour de force’ of type design studios.

One of the things that really sets Fontsmith apart is their ability to create really beautiful typefaces that work superbly on screen; BBC One, Channel 4, More 4, ITV, Film 4 to name a few.

Enjoyable and well worth looking at - Fontsmith